Nicholas Blake (Author of The Beast Must Die) edit data Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet Cecil Day-Lewis C. Day Lewis who was born in Ireland in 1904. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and his wife Kathleen (nee Squires). His mother died in 1906 and he and his father moved to London where he was brought up by his father with the help of an aunt. He spent his holidays in Wrexford and regarded himself very much as anglo-irish, although when the Republic of Ireland was declared in 1948 he chose British citizenship. He was married twice, to Mary King in 1928 and to Jill Balcon in 1951 and during the 1940s he had a long love affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann. He had four children from his two marriages with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, documentary filmmaker and television chef Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet Cecil Day-Lewis C. Day Lewis who was born in Ireland in 1904. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and his wife Kathleen (nee Squires).

His mother died in 1906 and he and his father moved to London where he was brought up by his father with the help of an aunt. He spent his holidays in Wrexford and regarded himself very much as anglo-irish, although when the Republic of Ireland was declared in 1948 he chose British citizenship. He was married twice, to Mary King in 1928 and to Jill Balcon in 1951 and during the 1940s he had a long love affair with novelist Rosamond Lehmann. He had four children from his two marriages with actor Daniel Day-Lewis, documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis being three of his children. He began work as a schoolmaster and during World War II he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information. After the war he joined Chatto & Windus as a senior editor and director and then in 1946 he began lecturing at Cambridge University.

He later taught poetry at Oxford University, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951-1956 and from 1962-1963 he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University. But he was by then earning his living mainly from his writings, having had some poetry published in the late 1920s and early 1930s and then in 1935 beginning his career as a thriller writer with 'A Question of Proof', which featured his amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, reputedly modelled on W H Auden. He continued the Strangeways series, which finally totalled 16 novels ending with 'The Morning After Death' in 1966. He also wrote four detective novels which did not feature Strangeways. He continued to write poetry and became Poet Laureate in 1968, a post he held until his death in 1972. He was also awarded the CBE. He died from pancreatic cancer on 22 May 1972 at the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying.

He is buried in Stinsford churchyard, close to the grave of one of his heroes Thomas Hardy, something that he had arranged before his death. ...more Cecil Day-Lewis, crime writer - Telegraph Book Reviews Cecil Day-Lewis, crime writer On the 40th anniversary of the death of Cecil Day-Lewis, his biographer Peter Stanford celebrates his bestselling detective novels written under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, which are finally back in print. Cecil Day Lewis playing draughts with his son Daniel, 5th January 1968. Photo: (Photo by Chris Ware/Keystone Features/Getty Images) By Peter Stanford 12:55PM BST 08 May 2012 Day-Lewis is best remembered today on three counts: as W H Auden’s acolyte in the lionised Left-leaning group of “Thirties Poets”; as a modernising Poet Laureate in the Sixties; and as the father of the Oscar-winning actor Daniel. He was always noticeably coy, though, about one of his more successful sidelines: writing bestselling crime fiction under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.

“I have a feeling,” he once remarked, “that people who read detective novels don’t like the detective novelist to be anything like a serious poet.” Like most of Day-Lewis’s verse, his 19 Blake books, all but four featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways, have slowly drifted out of fashion since he was felled by cancer in 1972. In the late Eighties, his daughter, Tamasin, then a director, now a cookery writer, did have plans to film the final one, The Private Wound, but they came to naught. Now, however, to mark the 40th anniversary of his death, Vintage is relaunching the first four – A Question of Proof, Thou Shell of Death, There’s Trouble Brewing and The Beast Must Die – with striking new Thirties-themed jackets, and admiring comments from modern-day practitioners such as P D James. The publishers’ hope seems to be that the books will attract a new audience as period pieces, capturing the same market still served by Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham or Dorothy L Sayers. Better still, they might even tempt a television production company looking for the next Poirot, or Lord Peter Wimsey.

And – here they really have their heads in the clouds – what if Daniel Day-Lewis were to take the lead? Of course, when first written, Day-Lewis père had painted the backdrop to the crimes he was solving as a picture of contemporary society. The very first, A Question of Proof (1935), is set in a public school that so resembled Cheltenham College, where Day-Lewis was then teaching, that its publication almost lost him his job. The chairman of governors, Lord Lee (the soldier and politician who donated his house Chequers to the nation as a country seat for prime ministers) took umbrage at the book’s portrayal of a young teacher having an affair with the headmaster’s wife. Lee refused to accept any distinction between fact and fiction, and it took a personal assurance from the wife of the school’s head that she was not romantically involved with Day-Lewis to save the young poet from the sack.

Although he was at the very height of his critical acclaim as a poet in these middle years of the Thirties – his collection The Magnetic Mountain (1933) won him rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic and T E Lawrence had hailed him publicly as “the one great man in England” – Day-Lewis was still struggling to financially support his wife, Mary, and their two young sons. The immediate spur for A Question of Proof, he recalled, was needing £100 to repair the roof of their cottage in Cheltenham. Related Articles W H Auden struggles for the conch 31 May 2008 First novels are, conventional wisdom has it, strongly autobiographical, and there is certainly a strong dose of Day-Lewis’s domestic life in each of these four early Blakes, from the choice of a school setting in A Question of Proof, to the all-consuming desire of the writer Frank Cairns in The Beast Must Die to avenge himself on the hit-and-run driver who had killed his young son. Day-Lewis had experienced a near miss in a similar situation with his eldest boy, Sean.

But the detective he created, the poet and amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, owed much more in these books to W H Auden, Day-Lewis’s great friend, collaborator and a frequent guest at his Cheltenham cottage. Strangeways resembles Auden – blond, dishevelled and short-sighted – and, like him, prefers to sleep under a great weight of blankets and carpets, walks with “ostrich-strides” and has didactic as his default setting. He even mirrors Auden in having an inglorious examination record at Oxford. At first, it had been Day-Lewis’s intention to keep the real identity of Nicholas Blake a secret. He had chosen the pseudonym by combining his second son’s Christian name with his mother’s (and later Daniel’s) middle name. When A Question of Proof first appeared in 1935, it was billed simply as the work of “a well-known writer” using a pen name. But in his letters to friends, Day-Lewis was open from the start and so news soon got out.

“I’ve been trying to write commercial prose,” he confided in 1934 to his fellow Thirties Poet Stephen Spender, “as I may get chucked out of my job any time now for my political opinions… I am horrified but secretly fascinated at the ease with which I can write good, window-box, bloody awful entertainment stuff.” That slightly dismissive tone remained his line in public ever after his double life as Nicholas Blake was raised. As a well-known Communist in the Thirties – MI5 spied on him – and a radical politically ever after, he was perhaps uneasy with the middle-of-the-road, cosy image of detective fiction. The detective books simply allowed him, he explained, “to put butter on the bread provided by poetry”. But it wasn’t always that clear cut. The commercial success of these early titles tempted Day-Lewis in the late Thirties to experiment with more literary fiction, but the three novels he produced for Rupert Hart-Davis on political themes sank without trace. “My seriousness,” he concluded, “at present runs into verse.” Seventy-five years on, as one reads these reissued titles, Day-Lewis’s own damning verdict on his alter ego feels far too harsh.

He is certainly an expert plotter who keeps you turning the pages. There’s Trouble Brewing has all the labyrinthine twist and turns of a modern Danish television drama when a body is found in the vat at Bunnett’s Brewery in picture-postcard Dorset. And there is also a quality of language and psychological astuteness that lift these books above the ordinary. One of his contemporaries, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, described the Blake books as “something quite by themselves in English detective fiction”. Many experts consider The Beast Must Die – with its dramatic opening lines, “I am going to kill a man. I don't know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him” – to be the finest Blake of all as it delves inside the head of a parent grieving the loss of his child. It sold more than half a million copies on publication, doing particularly well in the United States, and was later filmed in 1969 as Que la bête meure by the French director Claude Chabrol. Vintage is also making the other 11 Strangeways mysteries available on a print-on-demand basis.

Those tempted to follow the development of Day-Lewis’s insightful and charismatic detective may see the element of autobiography grow stronger with the years. “Nigel S started life as a chap modelled on Auden physically,” Day-Lewis remarked in the Fifties. “Can he have grown to resemble me, as they say married couples tend to do with each other?” Literary detectives might also like to try out a pet theory of Stephen Spender, namely that the outwardly courteous and gentlemanly Poet Laureate used his Blake books to revenge himself on his mistresses. The habit has its origins, arguably, in Thou Shell of Death, when Strangeways is first given a love interest, a free-spirited explorer, Georgina Cavendish, loosely based on Margaret Marshall, an older, sexually adventurous woman with whom Day-Lewis was entangled when at Oxford, to the great distress of his vicar father. Cavendish then dies in the Blitz in 1941 in Minute for Murder at precisely the point that Day-Lewis himself falls in love with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann and turns his back on his first wife, Mary.

In 1957’s End of Chapter, there is more than a passing resemblance between the victim, young, highly strung female novelist Millicent Miles, and Day-Lewis’s mistress, Elizabeth Jane Howard, best friend of his second wife, Jill Balcon. And then in The Deadly Joker (1963), the corpse belongs to Vera Paston, who shares much in common with the Indian novelist, Attia Hosain, with whom Day-Lewis had been involved. But knowing the ins and outs of Day-Lewis’s complicated private life is not essential to enjoy his Nicholas Blake output. The books can be read simply for themselves. If the settings are no longer modern, the sensibility is, with some of the dilemmas touched on – for example, consumerism in Thou Shell of Death – as relevant today as ever. In his lifetime Day-Lewis, Jill Balcon used to recall, was always wary that his work as Nicholas Blake might be taken by some critics as proof positive that he wasn’t sufficiently serious about being a poet. One long-time detractor, Geoffrey Grigson, for instance, once lampooned him for “hiding his threepenny self in Nicholas Blake”.

But the perspective of 40 years quickly dispels any such fear. The poet enriches the prose and adds an extra something to the plots. Nicholas Blake need no longer hide his light under a bushel. A Question of Proof, Thou Shell of Death, There’s Trouble Brewing and The Beast Must Die are published by Vintage at £8.99. Other titles are available print-on-demand Peter Stanford will be speaking about Cecil Day-Lewis’s crime books at the Telegraph Ways With Words festival. The Nicholas Blake Treasury (Volume 1): Thou Shell of Death; The Beast Must Die; The Corpse in the Snowman: Nicholas Blake (pseudonym), C. Day Lewis: Amazon.com: Books By Michael Wischmeyer on July 1, 2006 The poet Cecil Day-Lewis (1904 -72) gained fame under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake for his stories involving Nigel Strangeways, a fictional poet with a penchant for solving murder mysteries. These well-constructed mysteries are noted as much for their witty dialogue, character development, and psychological complexity as for the puzzle itself. One reviewer observed: Blake will always be a writer for the connoisseur of detective fiction.

This four volume, hard cover edition, The Nicholas Blake Treasury, includes twelve of the sixteen Nigel Strangeways mysteries. Only The Dreadful Hollow (1953), The Whisper in the Gloom (1954), The Sad Variety (1964), and The Morning After Death (1966) are missing. The first two volumes (burgundy and green covers, respectively) were published by Nelson Doubleday, Inc and the third and fourth editions (orange and blue covers) by the Mystery Guild. Volume 1: Thou Shell of Death (1936), The Beast Must Die (1938), and The Corpse in the Snowman (1941). These three stories are among the best.

Volume 2: A Question of Proof (1935), There's Trouble Brewing (1937), and The Smiler with the Knife (1939) Volume 3: Murder with Malice (1940), Minute for Murder (1947), and Head of a Traveler (1949) Volume 4: End of Chapter (1957), The Widow's Cruise (1959), and The Worm of Death (1961). Cecil Day-Lewis was professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951-56, and a lecturer in the 1960s at several universities. He was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis is his son. Unable to find these book club editions? Try looking for the Nigel Strangeways mysteries reissued as Perennial Library paperbacks by Harper and Row Publishers in the late 1970s.

Thou Shell of Death: Nicholas Blake: Amazon.com: Books Thou Shell of Death Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1 This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading. Next Special Offers and Product Promotions Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here , or download a FREE Kindle Reading App . New York Times best sellers Browse the New York Times best sellers in popular categories like Fiction, Nonfiction, Picture Books and more. See more Product Details Publisher: Berkley; Reprint edition (1964) ASIN: B002B1OP02 on July 25, 2007 Format: Mass Market Paperback Thou Shell of Death (1936) is among the earliest mysteries by Nicholas Blake, and is rated as one of his best stories, along with The Beast Must Die and The Corpse in the Snowman. The poet and amateur detective, Nigel Strangeways, is asked to spend the Christmas holidays at the home of Fergus O'Brien, a legendary World War I flying ace.

O'Brien has received four threatening notes promising that he will die on the day after Christmas. Despite Strangeways' presence, O'Brien dies. For readers already acquainted with the Nigel Strangeways' stories, Thou Shell of Death is notable in that Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard is first introduced in this story. Also, at O'Brien's estate Strangeways first meets the adventuresome Georgia Cavendish; she later becomes his wife. Thou Shell of Death is a literate, carefully constructed manor house mystery. The title, Thou Shell of Death, is a quote from a lesser known Elizabethan play, The Revenger's Tragedy authored by either Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton. Familiarity with The Revenger's Tragedy might help the astute reader in unraveling this clever murder mystery. Nicholas Blake is a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis, poet laureate from 1968 to his death in 1972. The actor, Daniel Day-Lewis, is his son. The Strangeways stories were reprinted as Perennial Library paperbacks by Harper Collins Publishers.

Another source (The Nicholas Blake Treasury) is an inexpensive, four volume, hardcover, book club edition published by the Mystery Guild. Volume 1 (burgundy red cover) contains Thou Shell of Death, The Beast Must Die, and The Corpse in the Snowman. A review of all Nicholas Blake mystery novels featuring Nigel Strangeways, with summaries, best reviews and links to further information | Good Mystery A Proud Amazon Associate Nicholas Blake & Nogel Strangeways Mysteries Cecil Day-Lewis, CBE (1904 – 1972) was a British poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He was the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis. In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), he wrote “As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results”.

Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, Athy/Stradbally border, Queen’s County (now known as County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (died 1937) and Kathleen Blake (née Squires; died 1906). Some of his family was from England (Hertfordshire and Canterbury). His father took on the surname “Day-Lewis” as a combination of his own birth father’s (“Day”) and adoptive father’s (“Lewis”) surnames. After the death of his mother in 1906, Cecil was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in County Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford. In Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of the circle gathered around W. H. Auden and helped him to edit Oxford Poetry 1927. His first collection of poems, Beechen Vigil, appeared in 1925.

In 1928 he married Constance Mary King, the daughter of a Sherborne teacher, and worked as a schoolmaster in three schools, including Larchfield School, Helensburgh, Scotland. During the 1940s he had a long and troubled love affair with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. His first marriage was dissolved in 1951, and he married actress Jill Balcon, daughter of Michael Balcon. During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, an institution satirised by George Orwell in his dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, but equally based on Orwell’s experience of the BBC. During the Second World War his work was no longer so influenced by Auden and he was developing a more traditional style of lyricism. Some critics believe that he reached his full stature as a poet in Word Over All (1943), when he finally distanced himself from Auden. After the war he joined the publisher Chatto & Windus as a director and senior editor. In 1946, Day-Lewis was a lecturer at Cambridge University, publishing his lectures in The Poetic Image (1947).

He later taught poetry at Oxford, where he was Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956. During 1962–1963, he was the Norton Professor at Harvard University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, in succession to John Masefield. Day-Lewis’s epitaph, taken from his poem Is it Far to Go?, reads: Shall I be gone long? For ever and a day. To whom there belong? Ask the stone to say. Ask my song. Day-Lewis’s two marriages yielded four children, including Academy Award-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis, food writer and journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and TV critic and writer Sean Day-Lewis, who wrote a biography of his father, C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). In his youth, Day-Lewis adopted communist views, becoming a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from 1935 to 1938, and his early poetry was marked by didacticism and a preoccupation with social themes. After the late 1930s, he gradually became disillusioned with communism.

Among his works is his autobiography, Buried Day (1960), in which he renounces his communist views, while his detective story, ‘The Sad Variety’ (1964), contains a scathing portrayal of doctrinaire communists, the repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, and the ruthless tactics of Soviet intelligence agents. Nicholas Blake In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, ‘A Question of Proof’, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey. This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modelled on W. H. Auden, but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing.

He is also credited with one film, This Man Must Die (1969), starring Michel Duchaussoy, Caroline Cellier, and Jean Yanne, originally produced in French. ***** Note: A not so healthy sports day? The annual Sports Day at respected public school Sudeley Hall ends in tragedy when the headmaster’s obnoxious nephew is found strangled in a haystack. The boy was despised by staff and students alike, but English master Michael Evans, who was seen sharing a kiss with the headmaster’s beautiful young wife earlier that day, soon becomes a prime suspect for the murder. Luckily, his friend Nigel Strangeways, nephew to the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, is on hand to help investigate the case. Thou Shell of Death (1936) AKA: Shell of Death **** Note: A predictable Boxing Day? Fergus O’Brien, a legendary World War One flying ace with several skeletons hidden in his closet, receives a series of mocking letters predicting that he will be murdered on Boxing Day. Undaunted, O’Brien throws a Christmas party, inviting everyone who could be suspected of making the threats, along with private detective Nigel Strangeways.

But despite Nigel’s presence, the former pilot is found dead, just as predicted, and Nigel is left to aid the local police in their investigation while trying to ignore his growing attraction to one of the other guests – and suspects – explorer Georgina Cavendish. There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. **** Note: Craft beer? Private detective and poet Nigel Strangeways is invited to address the Maiden Astbury literary society. The picturesque Dorset town is home to Bunnett’s Brewery, run by the much disliked, and feared, Eustace Bunnett and shortly before Nigel’s visit, Bunnett’s dog Truffles, was found dead in one of the brewery’s vats. The culprit was never caught – although there was no shortage of suspects – but when a body is then found in the same vat, boiled down to its bones, Nigel is called into action to help capture the killer. The third book in the Nigel Strangeways series, this is a gloriously inventive, puzzling and witty investigation to delight all fans of classic crime. The Beast Must Die (1938) Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. **** Note: The perfect murder?

Respected crime writer Frank Cairns plots the perfect murder – a murder that he himself will commit. Cairns intends to murder the hit-and-run driver who killed his young son, but when his intended victim is found dead and Cairns becomes the prime suspect, the author insists that he has been framed. An old friend of Cairns calls in private detective Nigel Strangeways, who must unravel a fiendishly plotted mystery if he is to discover what really happened to George Rattery. The Beast Must Die is one of Nicholas Blake’s most acclaimed novels and was picked by the Observer as one of the 1,000 novels everyone must read. The Smiler with the Knife (1939) Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. **** Note: The revolution is at hand? Detective Nigel Strangeways, and his explorer wife Georgia have taken a cottage in the countryside. They are slowly beginning to adjust to a more relaxed way of life when Georgia finds a mysterious locket in their garden and unwittingly sets the couple on a collision course with a power-hungry movement aimed at overthrowing the government.

It will take all of Nigel’s brilliance and Georgia’s bravery if they are to infiltrate the order and unmask the conspirators. Malice in Wonderland (1940) AKA: The Summer Camp Mystery Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. **** Note: Murder in Wonderland! Private detective Nigel Strangeways receives a call for help from Wonderland, a new holiday camp that has recently opened only to be plagued by a series of cruel practical jokes conducted by someone calling themselves ‘The Mad Hatter’. The camp’s owners are convinced a rival firm, desperate to put them out of business, are behind the events. Or could it be a disgruntled employee, or even one of the four hundred guests currently staying at the camp? As the pranks become increasingly dangerous and tensions rise, Nigel must do all he can to uncover the Mad Hatter’s true identity – before it’s too late. The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) AKA: The Corpse in the Snowman Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. *** Note: A strange beginning… A small boy playing in the park is handed a crumpled piece of paper by a stranger, who then collapses and dies.

The boy, realising that he himself is now in danger, flees from the park with the help of detective Nigel Strangeways, only to discover that the mysterious message consists of just his own name and age: Bert Hale 12. Bert and his young friends are confident that they can crack the case but they soon discover that they will need the help of not just Nigel Strangeways, but of the whole British government… End of Chapter (1957) **** Note: A pleasure cruise? When private detective Nigel Strangeways books tickets for a holiday in the Greek islands with renowned sculptor Claire Massinger, he has no idea that the trip will end in tragedy. From the moment the boat sets sail it becomes clear that many of his fellow passengers – from a neurotic widow to the ship’s lecturer – have guilty secrets to hide, but do any of them also have a motive for murder? It will take all of Nigel’s insight and flair if he is to uncover the truth. The Worm of Death (1961) Available in paperback, ebook, and audible editions. **** Note: A legless corpse!

Several days after private detective and poet Nigel Strangeways dines with Dr Piers Loudon and his family, the doctor vanishes, only for his legless corpse to be fished out of the river Thames. When his family ask Nigel to protect their interests during the police investigation, it soon becomes apparent that each member of the deceased’s family, from his adopted son to his daughter’s unpleasant fiancée, had a strong motive for killing him. As the winter fog swirls outside, Nigel must find his way through a maze of conflicting stories, missing diaries and red herrings. The Sad Variety (1964) *** Note: A policeman murdered! Hugo Chesterman: on trial for murdering a policeman. Why did he do it? Or could he be innocent? Daisy Bland: Young, beautiful and naive, her testimony threatens to send her husband to the gallows. For the young, and pretty, Daisy Bland it all started when she literally bumped into Hugo and fell madly in love. She gives up everything for him: her job, her friends, her independence. Blinded by love and naively trusting, she asks no questions about his vague profession as a ‘commission agent’, his suspicious associates and reckless financial decisions.

When Hugo is arrested for the murder of a policeman in a burglary gone wrong, Daisy doesn’t know what to believe, but her husband’s life is in her hands… A Penknife in My Heart (1958) Available in paperback and ebook editions. *** Note: The local joker! When John Waterson and his young wife chose Netherplash Cantorum, Dorset, for their retirement years, they could not have predicted that this idyllic spot had one severe but unforeseeable drawback: among its inhabitants was a practical joker whose fertile mind ran to the most bizarre and grotesque designs. The Village was no place for a quite retirement, or for a gentle recuperation from the nervous breakdown that had afflicted Waterson’s wife. In Netherplash, the peace is continually disrupted with extraordinary events tripping over each other which, in the end, lead to a hideous and painful murder. With a cast of characters who are both bizarre and believable, this is an original tour-de-force of crime fiction placing Blake firmly in the genre. The Private Wound (1968) **** Note: A different note in the finale!

In the West of Ireland in 1939 a young novelist rents a lonely cottage to write his new book in peace. Almost at once, and without great resistance, he is seduced by the wife of the local squire. Harriet’s husband is an older man – hot-tempered, impoverished, gone to seed – who once fought famously against the Black and Tans. Soon this eternal triangle becomes a local scandal, and the atmosphere of threat and violence, intensified by the approaching war in Europe, leads to a horrific murder. The Private Wound is Nicholas Blake’s last book, written with such intensity of feeling and depth of character that it is widely regarded as his best. Bloomsbury - Nicholas Blake - Nicholas Blake Trade Nicholas Blake Author pictures are not to be reproduced without permission. Please refer to our Terms and Conditions for full details. Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet and author, Cecil Day-Lewis, used primarily for his mystery series. Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904 - 22) was a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.

He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.

17 October 2012, EPUB eBook $6.99 19 September 2012, EPUB eBook $6.99 16 July 2012, EPUB eBook $6.99 16 July 2012, EPUB eBook $6.99 Cecil Day-Lewis The certainty of power. (from 'Tempt Me No More') In his youth Day-Lewis adopted communist views. As an act of rebellion, he also removed the hyphen in his name, but reinstated it later in life. Some of his early poems have a strong political and didactic subtex. Along with writers such as W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender, Day-Lewis was under the surveillance of the Security Service (MI5) and other branches of British intelligence. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Day-Lewis planned to go to Spain and join the International Brigade, but as he later confessed, he "lacked the courage to do so." From the late 1930s, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the Communist Party, which he evetually renounced.

To cut himself off all contacts with the Party, he moved to the village of Musbury near the Devon border – there was "no Party group within many miles." A new turn in Day-Lewis's career occured in 1935, when he decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel. His agent advised him to separate the roles of detective novelist and poet. Thus he created Nigel Strangeways, the hero of sixteen of his twenty books, who was named after the former name of the HM Prison Manchester. The first novel, A Question of Proof, published under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake, was written to pay for the repair of a leaky roof. For Day-Lewis's surprise, it became a selection of the Crime Club and eventually was followed by nineteen more crime novels. From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. A liaison with the wife of a local farmer resulted in the birth of a son. 'Well, I've not been in jail yet. I did get fined for sitting in Trafalgar Square. It was one of those Committee of a Hundred picnics.' 'I see.

You believe in unilateral disarmament?' 'Every sensible person does.' Cherry took a deep breath, about to launch on a political speenc, but Sparkes forestalled her. 'Would you say that betraying your country's secrets to an enemy advanced the cause of nuclear disarmament?' (from Ask Me Another, 1964) By the end of the decade Day-Lewis was living in Devon. He had published several collections of poems under the influence of Auden, among others From Feathers to Iron (1932), Collected Poems (1935), and A Time to Dance and Other Poems (1935). From 1941 he worked at the Ministry of Information as an editor in the publication department. Still regarded as a communist propagandist, he was not allowed to speak on radio, but he provided ad hoc scripts for the BBC and his Nicholas Blake detective radio play Calling James Braithwaite was broadcast in July 1940. At the end of the war Day-Lewis joined the publisher Chatto&Windus as a director and senior editor.

In Word Over All (1943) Day-Lewis distanced him from Auden and reached his full stature as a writer. Many of the following works reflected his personal life, extramarital affairs, and the turbulent nine-year relationship with the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. In 1951 Day-Lewis married actress Jill Balcon, the daughter of the film mogul Sir Michael Balcon. She was 21 years his junior; he was the greatest love of her life. They had two children, Tamasin and Daniel. The couple settled in a large Georgian house in Greenwich. A few years after the marriage, when he was working for Chatto&Windus, he had a brief affair with Elizabeth Jane Howard, a young writer, who left him. A poem from this period, entitled 'Moods of Love', expressed his anger and frustration: "Better a brutal twitching of the reins And off, than this devouring pious whore Who in soft regret will twine you fast Where thigh-bones mope along the tainted shore And crazed beachcombers pick over their past. ..." Howard married the novelist Kingsley Amis in 1965.

Day-Lewis was professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951-56, and a lecturer in the 1950s and 1960s at several universities. During a fruitful time at Harvard in 1964-5, where he held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair, he wrote On Not Saying Anything (1964). In succession to John Masefield he was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968. Day-Lewis was chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel, vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, Honorary Member of the American Academy, Member of the Irish Academy of Letters. Day-Lewis died from cancer, on May 22, 1972, in the Hertfordshire home of Kingsley Amis and Elisabeth Jane Howard, where he and his wife were staying. A great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he had arranged that he should be buried as close as possible to the author's grave in Stinsford churchyard. The Whispering Roots (1970) was the last volume published in his lifetime. 'The Expulsion' (1972), which appeared in a Festschrift for W.H.

Auden's 68th birthday in a limited edition, was inspired by Masaccio's frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. Day-Lewis saw them for the first time on a convalescence holiday in 1970. "Masaccio paints us both A childish tragedy – hunched back, bawling mouth, And the hour when the animal knew that it must die And with that stroke put on humanity." Upon reading the typescrift, the sculptor Henry Moore told that he had learned something new about the fresco. Day-Lewis's early mystery novels are full of literary references, from Shakespeare to Blake, Keats, Arthur Hugh Clough and A.E. Housman. A Question of Proof was set in similar preparatory school milieu, where he was teaching at the time. Head of a Traveller (1949) was dedicated to Rosamond Lehmann's children.

Among Day-Lewis's best mysteries are The Beast Must Die (1938), a story of a father seeking revenge on the hit and run driver who killed his child, The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941), A Tangled Web (1956), based on a real murder case, and End of Chapter (1957). Nigel Strangeways, the series detective, is an Oxford graduate, six feet tall, blue eyed, always at the disposal of Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard, the British Secret Service, and his many friends. In Thou Shell of Death Stangeways meets and marries explorer Georgia Cavendish, but after WW II he continues as a widower. During the years, Nigel Strangeways ages and changes, and sees the world less idealistically. The critic and award-winning mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included in 1987 The Beast Must Die among the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published. Day Lewis's own son was almost run over in a circumstance similar to that which the story describes. It begins with the promise: "I am going to kill a man... I have no idea what he looks like.

But I am going to find him and kill him." The title of the story was taken from the text of Brahm's Four Serious Songs, a paraphrase of the Book of Ecclesiastes: "The beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die." The Private Wound (1968) concerns the problems that divide Ireland, and was considered the most autobiographical of the author's works in the mystery genre. Thou Shell of Death (1936) was a contemporary version of Cyril Tourneur's gory 1607 play, The Revenger's Tragedy. Day-Lewis's best-known children's book is The Otterbury Incident (1948), a story of a group of kids, who outwit criminals. In Dick Willoughby (1933) Day-Lewis depicted the life of a young Elizabethan, adding into his adventures secret tunnels, sword-play, an evil Catholic kinsman, and an innocent romance. For further reading: C. Day Lewis by Clifford Dyment (1955);The Buried Day by C. Day Lewis (1960); C.

Day Lewis, The Poet Laureate: A Bibliography by Geoffrey Handley-Taylor and Timothy d'Arch Smith (1968); C. Day Lewis by Joseph N. Riddel (1971); C. Day Lewis: An English Literary Life by Sean Day-Lewis (1980); Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books by H.R.F. Keatring (1987); St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers, ed. by Jay P. Pederson (1996); C Day-Lewis: a Life, by Peter Stanford (2007); British Writers and MI5 Surveillance 1930-1960 by James Smith (2013) - Other university professors who have published mystery novels: Michael Innes , Edmund Crispin . Selected works: Beechen Vigil, and Other Poems, 1925 Oxford Poetry, 1927 (ed., with W.H.

Auden) Country Comets, 1928 From Feathers To Iron, 1931 The Magnetic Mountain, 1932 A Hope for Poetry, 1934 Revolution in Writing, 1935 Collected Poems 1929–1933, 1935 A Question of Proof , 1935 A Time To Dance And Other Poems, 1935 Noah and the Waters, 1936 A Time to Dance, and Other Poems, 1936 Thou Shell of Death, 1936 (US title: Shell of Death, 1936; version of Cyril Tourneur's 1609 play The Revenger's Tragedy) Imagination and Thinking, 1936 (with L. Susan Stebbing) We're Not Going to Do Nothing, 1936 The Friendly Tree, 1936 A Writer in Arms, 1937 (ed., with John Lehmann and T.A.

Jackson) The Echoing Green: An Athology of Verse, 1937 (ed.) The Mind in Chains: Socialism and the Cultural Revolution, 1937 (ed.) Anatomy of Oxford, 1938 (ed., with Charles Fenby) Starting Point, 1938 Overtures to Death and Other Poems, 1938 The Beast Must Die, 1938 - Pedon on kuoltava (suom. Eva Siikarla, 1975) - Film adaptations: 1952, La bestia debe morir, dir. Rom�n Vi�oly, starring Narciso Ib��ez Menta, Laura Hidalgo, Guillermo Battaglia Barreto, Milagros de la Vega; 1968, in Detective TV series, dir. Tina Wakerell, dramatization Jane Baker, Pip Baker, with Bernard Horsfall (as Nigel Strangeways), Andrew Downie, Christine Finn and Yvonne Gilan; 1969, Que la b�te meure/Killer!, prod.

Les Films de la Bo�tie, Rizzoli Film, dir. by Claude Chabrol, starring Michel Duchaussoy, Jean Yanne, Caroline Cellier, Anouk Ferjac. "As in La Femme infid�le, Chabrol's meticulous mise en sc�ne and plotting tracks the emergence of contradictory emotions as good (love) comes from evil (murder and hatred), but neither impulse is able to overcome the rigours of fate however much the characters seek to control the course of events. In this respect, Chabrol.s real master is Fritz Lang rather than the often cited Hitchcock." (from The BFI Companion to Crime, ed.

by Phil Hardy, 1997) The Smiler With The Knife, 1939 Child of Misfortune, 1939 The Green Girdle, 1940 (screenplay) Poems in Wartime, 1940 Calling James Braithwaite, 1940 (radioplay) Selected Poems, 1940 Malice in Wonderland, 1940 (US title: The Summer Camp Mystery, 1940; as Malice with Murder, 1964) The Case of the Abominable Snowman, 1941 (US title: The Corpse in the Snowman, 1941) A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940, 1941 (ed., with L.A.G. Strong) Word Over All, 1943 Why Did C Day Lewis Write The Poem Why Did C Day Lewis Write The Poem Cecil Day Lewis Poems Classic Famous Poet All Poetry Poems by Cecil Day Lewis : All poetry of Cecil Day Lewis, poet, author, poem.

He also gained fame as a detective story writer under the name Nicholas Blake. In sixteen of his twenty And we will all the pleasures prove. Of peace and Cecil DayLewis The Poetry Foundation Cecil DayLewis has two contrasting claims on our attention. The father was a clergyman, and it was assumed that DayLewis would follow in his Auden and DayLewis served as joint editors of Oxford Poetry 1927, for which they wrote a The Poems C DayLewis Cecil DayLewis (or Day Lewis), CBE (27 April 1904  22 May 1972) was an AngloIrish poet In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), he wrote As a writer I do not use the His first C Day Lewis 20th and 21st Century British Literature Questia Site on Cecil DayLewis icnluding biography, bibliography, selected poems and audio narrations by Jill Balcon. When did C Day Lewis write 'Walking Away'? Ask Discover librarianselected research resources on C.

Day Lewis from the Questia Noah and the Waters and Other Poems, with an Essay, Revolution in Writing Cecil Day Lewis Thomas Hardy Website The poem 'Walking Away' was first published by Cecil DayLewis in 1962. The poem was written for his first son, but there is no documentation of when he first. Cecil DayLewis Quotes (Author of The Otterbury Incident) Cecil Day Lewis 1904 1972. Poet Laureate. Shall I be gone long? For ever and a day. To whom He also gained fame as a detective story writer under the name Nicholas Blake. In sixteen of his I did get fined for sitting in Trafalgar Squa Poetry and war the 30s Peace Pledge Union 3 quotes from Cecil DayLewis: 'A way of using words to say things which could not possibly be said in any other way, things We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand. The Complete Poems of C.

Day Lewis Cecil DayLewis Biography from Answers by Cecil Day Lewis / Enter the dreamhouse, brothers and sisters, leaving / Your debts asleep, your history at the door: / This is the home for heroes, and this Come live with me and be my love by Cecil Day Lewis Classic Come, live with me and be my love Cecil Day Lewis all Cecil Day Lewis poems. Come, live with me and be my love,And we will all the pleasures proveOf The Complete Poems of C Day Lewis C Lewis 9780804725859 Together with Auden, Spender and MacNeice, C. Day Lewis was one of the leading young Day Lewis started writing poetry very young and. his verse seems to depend on the variety of tones he could pick up, change, and discard at will. Living in Time The Poetry of C Day Lewis Albert Gelpi Amazon The Oxford poets of the 1930sW. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, and Day Lewis wrote some of the most moving poems in the language about mortality and Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images ?

C DayLewis (British poet) Encyclopedia Britannica Britannica How much do you really know about the stories and the authors of the classics you C. DayLewis, in full Cecil DayLewis (born Ap , Ballintubbert, County Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake he also wrote detective novels , Selected Poems C Day Lewis Amazon In this welcome centenary edition of C. Day Lewis poems, Jill Balcon has substantially written when he was Poet Laureate and a number of the Posthumous Poems. Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? A Hope for Poetry Seventyfive years after C Day Lewiss manifesto 3 Apr 2008 / Gordon Browns favourite poem was originally a passage of prose. What does his choice tell us about how we define poetry. Cecil DayLewis crime writer Telegraph On the 40th anniversary of the death of Cecil DayLewis, his biographer Poets as a modernising Poet Laureate in the Sixties and as the father of then a director, now a cookery writer, did have plans to film the final one, Day Lewis C(ecil) eNotes In addition to the poetry, Day Lewis wrote two dozen superb mystery novels (in .

He could not, as these poets did, find a way forward which would move away Arts Cecil Day Lewis Short Story and Poetry Competition Kildare ie Cecil DayLewis, born in 1904 was the son of a Church of Ireland minister, then and during that time his restless intellect led him to writing detective fiction. Scripts will be returned to author on receipt of a stamped addressed envelope The Complete Poems of C Day Lewis Stanford University Press The Complete Poems of C. Day Lewis C. Day Lewis. 1992 768 pp. ISBN: 9780804725859. Paper $36.95. Buy This Book. Reviews. Day Lewis could write in Editor's Pick

Question: Which poet wrote novels using the pseudonym Nicholas Blake?
Answer: CECIL DAY LEWIS